The Seven Deadly Sins - Acedia (Sloth)

I’m going to begin this morning with a wee clip from Zootropolis which some of you might have seen with the children or grandchildren.

Policewoman Judy Hopps wants to track down a car from its registration plate as quickly as possible. But she’s not best pleased when she finds out who’s staffing the desks at the DVLA!

(CLIP)

Now that’s funny. But it’s not sloth! At least, not as the Desert Fathers would have described it.

In our culture, sloth almost always means sluggishness or laziness, and the Bible certainly has something to say about that, especially in the book of Proverbs: 

As a door turns on its hinges, so a sluggard turns on his bed.

The sluggard buries his hand in the dish; he is too lazy to bring it back to his mouth. (Prov 26:14,15)

A sluggard does not plough in season;

so at harvest time he looks but finds nothing. (Proverbs 20:4)

So laziness is certainly a part of sloth; but it’s only a part of it.

The Desert Fathers, those early monastics who took themselves out to the desert in search of a purer life, used the term ‘acedia’ rather than sloth, and I’m going to follow suit today because as we’ll see ‘acedia’ is a much more nuanced and comprehensive word.

I pulled this image

together from my reading for today and straight away you’ll get a sense for what the monastics meant by acedia - they were speaking about:

listlessness, apathy, a lack of focus and purpose, indifference, ‘checking out’ – deciding that you can’t be bothered and aren’t going to try any more.

ennui, boredom, torpor, drudgery, dissipation – a sense that your energies are being wasted.

resignation, sadness, depression and cynicism – because you despair of any change ever being possible.

Some of the other deadly sins target the eye, or the stomach or the heart or the mind. Acedia throws a wet blanket of malaise over your whole being. It brings everything down.

As one writer puts it - “Envy thinks that if it can only get hold of the thing that is envied, it will be satisfied. Sloth is beginning to think that satisfaction can never be found.”. And when that thought settles into your heart, you’re in a bad way.

The Desert Fathers held that the source of their temptations were malign spirits, trying to lure them from the right way, and Evagrius has this to say about Acedia. 

“The demon of acedia – also called the noonday demon – is the one that causes the most serious trouble of all. He presses his attack about the fourth hour (10am) and besieges the soul til about the eighth hour. (2pm). First of all he makes it seem that the sun barely moves, and that the day is fifty hours long. Then he constrains the monk to look constantly out of the windows, to walk outside his cell (room), to gaze carefully at the sun to determine how far it stands from the ninth hour, to look now this way and that for distraction.

Then he instils in the heart of the monk a hatred for the place, a hatred for his very life itself, a hatred for manual labour.

He leads him to reflect that charity has departed from among the brethren, that there is no-one to give encouragement.

The demon drives him along to desire other places where he can more easily procure life’s necessities, more readily find work and make a real success of himself.

He leaves no leaf unturned to induce the monk to forsake his cell and drop out of the fight.

It all sounds very old fashioned, on first hearing, but when you boil it down it’s as relevant today as ever. We get bored. We look for distractions. We start to hate the situation we’re in; start dreaming of that mythical place where the grass is always greener and everything always goes well. We kid ourselves that we can find it. And so we leave the place we are, only to discover – in time - that the next place is just the same. Because the people we’re with are just the same. And we are just the same.

Living with acedia is like being in a kind of exile where things never feel quite right and we can’t find any peace. We become so listless that time, and even life itself, become burdensome.

The closest description of that in the Bible comes in the book of Deuteronomy. At this stage in their history, God is giving the law to the people of Israel, making a covenant with them as they travel through the desert. And with the covenant come blessings if they keep their end of the bargain, and curses if they don’t. And at the end there’s a warning of the state they’ll find themselves in if they turn their backs on God. They’ll end up in exile, far away from home and everything that makes for peace. 

“…you shall find no ease, no resting place for the sole of your foot. There the LORD will give you a trembling heart, failing eyes, and a languishing spirit. ⁶⁶Your life shall hang in doubt before you; night and day you shall be in dread, with no assurance of your life. ⁶⁷In the morning you shall say, “If only it were evening!” and at evening you shall say, “If only it were morning!”—because of the dread that your heart shall feel and the sights that your eyes shall see.”

So if this is the terrain of acedia , it’s little wonder that our gut reaction is to try and escape from it. And as we’ll see later, that may not be the right thing to do. But classically, we try to escape the pain of acedia in two ways. We leave, physically, or we leave mentally.

The temptation for a monk in acedia was to physically get up and leave.”I’m dying here. This place is a dead end, and these people are a dead loss. I’m going to go and find a better community where things come more easily and I can flourish and be appreciated.”

And that’s what some of them did. But of course, they’d never last long in their new setting because before long, something else would offend them, they’d get disaffected, and the whole cycle would start all over again.

They had a word for that kind of monk in the old days – ‘gyrovagues’ they were called. Monks who could never settle but just wandered from place to place looking for the perfect community; not realising that they had about as much chance of finding that as they had of finding the end of a rainbow.

Do you know anyone like that? Someone for whom satisfaction always seems to be out of reach? They’re always chasing after a new partner, or a new job, or a new setting in the hope that it will make things right, but they never seem to settle down and be happy. It’s a symptom of our age, I think. The false belief that if we only up sticks and leave where we are, then we’ll find happiness.

The Desert Fathers’ advice to us on that is simple. Abba Moses put it this way: “Stay in your cell (your little room), and your cell will teach you everything.” Centuries later, the great mathematician Blaise Pascal echoed that thought: He said

“I have discovered that all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact. That they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber.”

Stay in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything. Stay in your cell, in your situation, and you will eventually encounter yourself.

The path that leads to life doesn’t take you away from your present circumstances, it takes you deeper into them as you start to unpack them with God and begin discover the truth about yourself. You can’t do that work if you’re constantly running away.

That’s why St Benedict, in starting a new monastic community, introduced a vow of stability alongside the existing vows of obedience, chastity and poverty. He knew that if you run when things get difficult, you never learn. If you leave in a huff, you don’t grow. If you storm off because of others’ imperfections, you never do the harder work of facing up your own imperfections.

Acedia tells us that in order to make a life for ourselves, we have to get up and leave. In most circumstances, though not all, that’s the very thing we must not do.

Stay in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything. That’s the advice of the Fathers.

But as I suggested earlier, the noonday demon has a second mode of temptation up its sleeve. If it can’t make you leave your situation physically, it can encourage you to leave it mentally, and I have to say this – I think – is one of the strongest temptations of our age.  The temptation of distraction.

Distraction is an analgesic for the pain of acedia, and depending on your temperament, distraction can take one of two forms.

Those of us inclined to laziness tend to distract ourselves with things that amuse, a word that literally means without thought A-muse. You can binge on Netflix. Watch whole series over the space of a couple of evenings. You can check your mobile every couple of seconds; see what’s new on Facebook. That’s one of my temptations – especially when I’m at the PC supposed to be writing a sermon! You can follow the click-bait ads at the bottom of a webpage because you really want to find out how amazing Michelle from Eastenders looks now. Anything to distract yourself.

And if all else fails, you can sleep. Sleep and acedia often go together; and that’s less about laziness than it is about escaping the demands and the disappointments of life in a few moments of blissful forgetfulness.

When life feels routine and boring, amusement offers us an easy way out.

I’m reading a brilliant Stephen King series at the minute. It’s unputdownable. I fall asleep at night with the book in my hand, usually halfway through a chapter. And very recently, a little voice in my head has been encouraging me to take the book into the study and finish off the chapter in the morning. And, I have to confess to you, that’s what I’ve been doing. Because distracting myself, a-musing myself means I can delay settling down to the real work I should be doing – the work of prayer and spiritual reading, which demand more of my heart and mind.

Some folk find amusement distracting. Others distract themselves by throwing themselves into work. They keep busy so they don’t have to think. And that’s why the image of the lazy sloth isn’t always helpful - because acedia can sometimes manifest in hyperactivity.

Pascal writes: “Nothing is so insufferable to man as to be completely at rest, without passions without business, without diversion, without study. He then feels his nothingness, his forlornness, his insufficiency, his dependence, his weakness, his emptiness.”

In other words, when we cease working and sit alone in the silence of our cell, it’s then that we sense our creaturely need – the very thing which can open us up to God! But we’re so scared of facing it that we’d rather keep ourselves busy with a thousand other things. It helps keep our mind off troubling thoughts about ourselves or about God.

Is that you, I wonder? Would you know what to say to God if you sat still with him for ten minutes in a quiet room?

Once again, Pascal hits the nail on the head when he says:

“Distraction is the only thing that consoles us for our miseries. And yet, it itself is the greatest of our miseries. For it is this which hinders us from reflecting on ourselves and makes us insensibly ruin ourselves.”

Do you sense a touch of acedia in yourself this morning?

“How would I know” you ask!

Try asking where in life you’re feeling bored, or listless, or sad just now? Where are you tempted to give up? Where do you find yourself having daydreams about how things could be different, ‘if only’….

That’s your cell. The place you are, but the place that part of you is tired with. It could be a marriage, or a lack of marriage; life with children, or without children. It could be a job, a relationship, a responsibility you carry, a group that you belong to. And there are times when you wish you could walk away to where the grass seems greener.

If that’s ringing bells this morning, then the advice that the Fathers give is simple – don’t flee. Stay prayerfully in your cell. Let it show you yourself. Let it teach you. And don’t give in to your distractions. Little by little God will help you, and little by little, things can and will change.

I’ll end with this story from the Desert Fathers:  “A certain brother came to Abba Arsenius, his mentor, and told him that he could not fast and he could not pray and he could not work. Being the kind who could hide himself in busyness, he asked to be allowed to go and visit the sick, arguing that that was an equivalent good work.

Though this was indeed a good work, Abba Arsenius recognised that the devil had been sowing seeds and said to him ‘Go. Eat, Drink, Sleep. Just don’t leave your cell.’. He was well aware that it is endurance in the cell that makes a monk what he ought to be. So for three days the brother did just this. And then he was overcome with acedia.

But he found some little palm leaves and he started trimming them. The next day he started braiding them. And when he felt hungry, he said ‘here are some more palm leaves. I’ll prepare them and then have something to eat.’ He finished them and then he said. “Perhaps I’ll read a little bit before eating”. When he had done some reading he said ‘now I’ll sing a few Psalms and then I can go and eat with a good conscience.’

And so, by God’s help, he went on – little by little – until he had indeed become what he was meant to become.

Amen – and thanks be to God for his word.